This week we were supposed to find a paper that used quantitative methods. I chose “The digital divide shifts to differences in usage” that does a quantitative study of internet use in the netherlands and how this is correlated to age, gender, occupation, education level and internet experience. They have two research questions that they try to answer:
1. How do socio-demographic variables relate to the amount of Internet use?
2. How do socio-demographic variables relate to types of Internet usage?
They use a survey for collecting the data for this study. The survey is done through an online market research site, where the participants get a few cents as incentive for every survey they do. In this way they can get a big sample of participants, and a sample that are a good representation of the dutch population. The benefits with quantitative studies in general is that they are easy to analyse and you can do statistical calculations on the data. One limitation with most qualitative studies is that it’s hard to answer more complex research questions like “why” and get the motivation behind actions and thoughts.
I think that the data they collect in this paper only answer their research questions. About how much and what people do on the internet. They do prove that some population segments uses internet more during their free time and for more leisure kinds of activities than other segments of the population. They are trying to get a theory about how we with internet is moving away from a knowledge gap to a usage gap. The knowledge gap is a theory about how higher socioeconomic status groups gets information faster than lower socioeconomic status groups and that this increases the knowledge gap between them. The usage gap is a theory that includes this but also takes technology into consideration. Since to use internet to attain knowledge you need technology and knowledge about how to use it. But I don’t find anything that ties it all together, the research and the theory.
I’ve also read “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play” by K Kilteni, I Bergstrom, and M Slater. It was a paper about an experiment with changing body through virtual reality. They let their participants play an djembe drum while wearing a motion capture suit. While being immersed in virtual reality and seeing another body that moves just like them also playing a djembe drum. All this to create an body ownership illusions and so they feel that the body they see while looking down at oneself and in a virtual mirror is their real body. The participants were divided in two different groups one got a light-skinned formal dressed man as their avatar and the other avatar was a dark skinned man with casual clothing. They wanted to know if differences between real and virtual body will be noticeable in the person's behavior and attitudes during the body ownership illusion. The result was that they could see a difference in how complexed the participant's movement was in the different groups. I thought it was an interesting use of virtual reality and motion capture. Most of my encounters with quantitative study methods have been surveys, and it’s interesting to see other qualitative methods and that you don’t have to use the usual way of doing things. I tried to come up with more ways to measure data in the media technology field and one example I thought of is eye movement trackers.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
Benefits with quantitative methods are that there are easy to analyze your result and find empirical evidence for the conclusions you might be able to make from the data. But the information you can get from your data is limited, you might get proof of what is happening but not why.
- Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
With qualitative methods you get deeper into the question you study, and you might reach a theory of why, you get material that you maybe can ground theory on. Hard to make in a bigger scale and to make any conclusions that apply to a larger group. And you don’t get any empirical evidence for your result.
- Van Deursen, Alexander Jam; Van Dijk, Jan Agm (2014). The digital divide shifts to differences in usage. New Media & Society, 16(3), 507-526.
- Kilteni, Konstantina; Bergstrom, Ilias; Slater, Mel. (2013). Drumming in immersive virtual reality: the body shapes the way we play. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 19(4), 597-605.
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